Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service • Hacker News Board

Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#31

Post by kevin_morrill » Tue, Jan 25, 2011, 1:14 PM UTC

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #28

I love what Amazon is doing with AWS, and I like this new service a lot. Plus I'm a happy customer. But damn this is all getting very complicated. First they turn off email, so you have to find a provider, then they turn it back on, but you have to pay them. Looking at my AWS console, I've got 8 or 9 tabs on there -- each representing a little piece of what I might want in an app. Each has it's own help section with…

Seems like a white labeling opportunity. Though I am not sure if their TOS allows it.

Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#32

Post by jonknee » Tue, Jan 25, 2011, 1:23 PM UTC

Jabbles wrote: post #14

jonknee wrote: post #4

If it works like they say, this is a godsend. Email is a royal pain and the pricing of SES is well below market rate. Postmark ( http://postmarkapp.com/ ) is similar and is $1.50 per thousand, compared to $.10 per thousand from Amazon.

Mailchimp appears to be offering unique emails from $5 per thousand! They appear to have significant discounts for emailing lists, but even at $12903 for 24.8 million emails, that's still $.52 per thousand. http://www.mailchimp.com/pricing Data transfer rates still apply for Amazon, but still... am I missing something?

I think they are more for the mom-and-pop business who wants an email list, not web apps that need to send email (which was always a sore spot for EC2 customers). That's why I compared it to Postcard, which is directly marketed as email for web apps. It would certainly be possible to run a Mail Chimp-esque email list with this, but it would take a lot more technical know-how (at minimum you need to create your own views for subscribe/unsubscribe/send). Or at least it will until someone starts selling a wrapper around it for a small mark-up...

Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#33

Post by maverhick » Tue, Jan 25, 2011, 1:23 PM UTC

I like this. They are priced at 25% of sendgrid, which we use as we send a million emails a month or so. But sendgrid provides a dedicated IP address. Having a dedicated IP over a period of time helps with delivery as the IP 'reputation' increases based on your delivery rates.

A lot of EC2 Ips are blacklisted by ISPs because people just create instances and spam away using exim/sendmail. If amazon and keep its IPs clean and also manage the service well, this is going to be THE email sending service to use.

Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#34

Post by ordinaryman » Tue, Jan 25, 2011, 1:24 PM UTC

Seems Amazon wants to fight it out with Google, by matching the new services with Google App Engine's free quota.

$0.10 per thousand in SES -> $0.0001 per email recipient // Same as in GAE.

You can send 2,000 messages for free each day when you call Amazon SES from an Amazon EC2 instance directly or through AWS Elastic Beanstalk. // Same as in GAE.

This, along with the recent AWS Elastic Beanstalk release and Amazon's intent of making Java hosting easy and without restrictions (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2119104) all point to the day when I will be able to upload my Python app on GAE directly onto a pre-configured Amazon service (possibly making use of AppScale or TyphoonAE), which internally uses all these new services with free quotas.

Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#35

Post by mgw » Tue, Jan 25, 2011, 1:26 PM UTC

AWS' pace of innovation is simply stunning. It shows that the business is not an afterthought for Amazon but rather treated as being of the same importance as their core business.

Compare that to AppEngine and you have to say they leave them behind in the dust. (I know it's not an Apples to Apples comparison.)

Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#36

Post by mike-cardwell » Tue, Jan 25, 2011, 1:26 PM UTC

retube wrote: post #9

> Start sending email in minutes through Amazon SES using the AWS software development kits for Java and .NET I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the java ecosphere in terms of libraries and resources is unparalled.

Perl/CPAN wins hands down.

And I am both a Perl and a Java programmer.

Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#37

Post by aonic » Tue, Jan 25, 2011, 1:26 PM UTC

vladd wrote: post #2

It seems they implemented a gradual increase of daily quota to protect themselves against spammer abuse. Here's the link to the document describing the system: http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/...

And also, after you sign up for SES, you can't actually use it to send out emails to your customers until they grant you 'production' access. This process seems to be done manually as they say it can take up to 24 hours after an initial request, and from the sounds of it, someone contacts you personally to confirm your email usage.

Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#38

Post by jonknee » Tue, Jan 25, 2011, 1:26 PM UTC

eli wrote: post #23

aristidb wrote: post #20

So I was immediately looking at their REST API... And true to form, Amazon adds yet another slightly incompatible request signing method. Consistency is for wimps.

I dare you to look at the API for some of the "traditional" email service providers. I've had the displeasure of working with a few from some of the big names and they are real DailyWTF material.

I have worked with Constant Contact and it was a Constant Headache. My favorite was when they took the API down for maintenance and maintained HTTP 200 OK status codes for requests but instead of XML returned it was an HTML page saying they were down. I took a screenshot of the page because it was so surprising:

http://www.jongales.com/blog/2009/10/17/constant-contacts-in...